The Firefox Web Developer Toolbar Maximizes Your Productivity

If the saying "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different
results" is true, then the majority of Web developers should have been committed to the asylum a long time ago. After
all, the approach of repeatedly editing and reloading the page until everything is as desired is as universal as HTML
itself. Part of the problem is perhaps related to the Web environment itself; getting started building Web sites is
so simple that many developers fall into the trap of settling for a developmental approach which is simply
"good enough," rather than exploring more sophisticated, streamlined strategies. If your pointer finger has grown
callused from clicking the F5 button far too often, I encourage you to check out the Firefox Web
Developer Add-in, which offers an extraordinary array of features which will greatly improve your productivity no
matter the type or size of your next Web-related project. In this article I'll introduce you to Web Developer, providing
and overview of its many features and talking in further detail about a few of my favorites.

Installing Web Developer

Web Developer is actually a Firefox Add-on,
although it's commonly referred to as a toolbar because when enabled it is situated in a manner typical of
other toolbars such as the Google Toolbar. This approach puts many of the
toolbar's features within easy reach. See Figure 1 for a screenshot depicting the standard layout.

Figure 1. The Web Developer Toolbar

To install Web Developer, launch Firefox and head over to the Web Developer Add-on page, located
here. Click the Add to Firefox button
to install the Add-on. A popup window will open, asking you to confirm the installation request. Click the
Install Now button to continue. Following successful installation, you'll be prompted to restart
Firefox to complete the process.

Forms: Using the Forms menu you can overlay any forms embedded into the
page with information about the action, method, and form fields. Enabling the Form Information
option will produce a summary of all forms found on the page, including their name, method,
post action, and fields (including each field name, default value, and type).

Images: The extremely useful Images menu offers options for learning all sorts of
important details about embedded images, including file sizes, dimensions, alt attribute values,
and image paths. You can also use various menu options to hide all images in the page, hide only background images,
and view images as they would appear with only their alt attribute values displayed.

Information: The Information menu is probably the Web Developer feature I use most regularly, as
it provides a bevy of information about the page layout, displaying DIV dimensions, link destinations,
element ID and class details, a convenient JavaScript viewer, and many other page-related details. Frankly this single
feature is alone worth the download

Miscellaneous: The Miscellaneous menu offers a random array of features which don't fit
squarely into one of the other menu categories, although don't discount what you'll find here; among other options
you can enable a dynamic ruler which allows you to quickly and conveniently measure the pixel dimensions of any page
element. Figure 2 demonstrates this feature.

Outline: The Outline menu gives you the ability to outline many page element types, including
tables, block-level and deprecated elements, any element you mouseover, and more.

Resize: The Resize menu allows you to resize the browser window to any set of alternative
dimensions. For instance, you could use this feature to resize the browser window to 800x600 pixels in order to
experience what your Web site might look like on older computers.